On a pedestal of boulders overlooking a
glistening sea past the end of the road on Kaua‘i, a lone figure faces the
rising sun. Bare-chested and wrapped in a lava-lava, he wears a woven headband
and a large shell amulet, with white stripes painted across his cheeks. A
pointed canoe paddle is clenched like a spear in his hand. At his feet a
crouching cameraman pivots to film the moment as Simon Salopuka, a doctor from
the remote isle of Taumako in Solomon Islands, does his best to channel his
people’s greatest cultural hero: the primordial voyager Lata.

Salopuka has come to Kaua‘i to shoot scenes
of Lata lore for a documentary, part of an effort to draw attention to the
voyaging traditions of Taumako’s people, ethnic Polynesians who inhabit a
handful of islands in a predominantly Melanesian archipelago. While Pacific
wayfinding as a whole has experienced a renaissance in recent decades—including
the extraordinary worldwide voyage of the Hawaiian canoe Hokule‘a—Taumako’s
Polynesian voyaging traditions have remained known only to a relative few,
while the island’s people struggle to keep them alive.

It’s especially powerful for Salopuka to be
shooting the scene at this spot on Kaua‘i, an ancient hula platform dedicated
to the Hawaiian goddess Laka, one of a multitude of male and female forms by
which Lata is known throughout Polynesia. In Taumako, Lata is revered as the
first canoe-builder and voyager, who was eventually exiled from the island for
his trickster ways. It’s believed that he returns to Taumako whenever a canoe
is built and that all voyagers in effect “sail with Lata.” “Those kind of
stories make me feel part of what Lata did before,” Salopuka says in the
documentary. “I really feel that Lata is part of us.”

The film’s story is Salopuka’s story. He was
born on Taumako, a truly isolated volcanic island just a little over three
miles long, with no electricity, phone, airstrip or harbor. The population
fluctuates between about four hundred and seven hundred people, sustained by subsistence
farming and fishing with essentially no paid work available. Their homes are
built of dried leaf panels, locally grown and easy to replace after a cyclone.
Even basic imported foods like rice and coffee are treated as delicacies.
Two-way radio is Taumako’s only communication link with the world—if there are
any working batteries around.

Taumako’s people are often unable to get on
or off the island, because the government supply ship that visits every few
months (with luck) is the only interisland transport. A few people have canoes
with outboard motors, but the 130-mile trip to the nearest island group is
dangerous, and there is frequently no fuel. Because of this, the revival of
traditional Taumako voyaging canoes, called te
puke, is seen not only as a matter of cultural pride but a practical
necessity.

“In many ways they’ve become isolated by
modernity,” says Mimi George, a Kaua‘i-based anthropologist who studies Pacific
wayfinding cultures and has long been involved with Taumako voyaging efforts. “They
aren’t happy about not having access to marriage partners, foods and goods, and
they’re trying to reconnect with family and ancestors.”

At 14, Salopuka left Taumako for school and
didn’t return for many years. He became the first person from the island to
attend college, then earned a medical degree in Papua New Guinea. In 2005, when
he was working at a hospital in the Solomons’ capital, Honiara, he got a call
from Taumako’s paramount chief, Koloso Kaveia, asking him to help with a
project to revive the island’s voyaging traditions. By then, Salopuka says in
the film, “I had spent twenty years away from home, studying and working in the
hospital. City life was difficult, and I felt something was missing, something
deep from my culture.”

Kaveia, a master navigator who was then in
his nineties, wanted to build a te puke and reopen old seaways to partner
islands, including his dream of a final voyage to Vanuatu. Sadly, he died
before that voyage could become a reality, but in 2012 Salopuka and others honored
the chief’s legacy by sailing a smaller canoe to Nifiloli, about a hundred
miles away. “When I first got on the vaka”—another
term for canoe—“I was really a bit frightened,” Salopuka recalls of boarding
Taumako’s unique style of canoe, with a hull that rides mostly underwater. “You
can only see the platform where you are sitting, and the whole canoe is under
the sea, like a submarine.”

But Salopuka soon grew accustomed to the
sensation and to his duty as bailer, a constant chore on Taumako canoes. The
wind was good and the vaka traveled quickly, but at night clouds covered the
stars, which the navigators needed to find their way. Some of the crew members
wanted to turn back, Salopuka recalls in the film, “but I tried to ask old man
Kaveia if he can help us. And when I called his name, all of a sudden the stars
just came out.”

When the canoe landed at Nifiloli, relatives
were overjoyed to greet one another—including Salopuka, whose grandfather had
sailed for Nifiloli on a te puke decades earlier and never returned.

Off a canoe landing where a windward Kaua‘i
stream meanders into the ocean, Salopuka, done up again as Lata, looks down on
several sorrowful figures floundering in the water—a scene from legend in which
the hero encounters a crew of shipwrecked scoundrels and takes them aboard his
canoe. Alongside a house nearby, a long, low A-frame shelter shields the narrow
hull of a Taumako-style vaka, which was deftly carved by Kaveia and several
others from the island when they visited supporters on Kaua‘i in 1999.

Smoothly chipped on the outside and narrowing
upward at each end, the twenty-eight-foot albizia-log hull is hollowed out,
with just a narrow slit opening at the top, which for voyages is sealed up to
run just above the waterline. With sharply pointed crescent sails fashioned
from woven pandanus leaves and said to catch wind like the wings of a tropic
bird, Taumako’s canoes have a raised platform with a small shelter for the
captain and most precious cargo. Their unique underwater hulls are a sort of
ancient precursor to the semi-submersible technology used today in superyachts
and other high-tech ships. The craft are also remarkable in that instead of
tacking, the crew actually lifts the slim mast and carries the whole sail from
one end of the vaka to the other, a method known as shunting.

According to accounts of Spanish explorers in
the Pacific dating back to the 1500s, large traditional canoes, perhaps sixty
feet in length, could carry forty passengers or more, plus around ten crew and
several tons of cargo. They sailed on voyages of several hundred miles between
islands while cruising at a decent clip of about five to fifteen knots.

“It’s an amazing design,” says George. “The
hull, the ama [outrigger], the way
it’s sailed—it just works. They’re smooth, they have very quick acceleration
and they’re very easy to steer on many points of sail. And what’s so
fascinating about it is that you’re basically riding on a submarine with an
ama. It makes it fast and it makes it stable. And you can carry enormous weight
on a te puke.”

George first went to Taumako in 1993, when
she was sailing through the Pacific with her partner David Lewis, a maritime
adventurer and researcher whose 1972 book We,
the Navigators first shed light on some of the last traditional wayfinders
in the Pacific. Lewis had sailed to Taumako during his field voyages in the
late 1960s and was greatly influenced by the time he spent sailing with a
master navigator from nearby islands named Basil Tevake, who taught him about
the “star paths” that traditional navigators followed. “I was no stranger to
the complexities of navigation, having three times crossed the Atlantic
single-handed and having been the first to skipper a catamaran around the
globe,” Lewis wrote. “Nevertheless, Tevake’s feat (of expertly navigating
without instruments) was evidence of a skill far beyond my own experience.”

When Lewis returned to the Solomons with
George in 1993, they were welcomed to Taumako by Kaveia, who had been a
steersman for Tevake aboard David’s boat during his earlier visit. After a few
days, Kaveia asked for their help in preserving the island’s voyaging
knowledge. “One morning he woke us up for breakfast,” George remembers, “and he
said, ‘So, David, would you like me to tell you how we navigate?’ David was
flabbergasted but of course he said, ‘Yeah.’ And what Kaveia revealed changed
everything.”

Bit by bit the chief imparted a comprehensive
system of wayfinding that correlated deep knowledge of star positions, seasons,
winds, waves and other factors into one intricate framework called te nohoanga te matangi, or, roughly,
“the life of the wind positions.” “It was this whole amazing mental map,”
George says, “which has been a mystery in the literature for hundreds of
years.”

Kaveia also demonstrated ancestral techniques
even more difficult to explain scientifically, including an alleged ability to
influence the weather through metaphysical means. “As paramount chief, one of
his responsibilities was basically to control the weather, the wind and the
seas,” George says. “And all I can say is that when he said his prayers and
pointed these various sticks at clouds or called the wind to come from a
certain position, it worked. He never missed once.”

And then there is the phenomenon known as te lapa: mysterious flashes of light in
the water that are believed to form a beacon pointing the way to unseen
islands. Taumako’s voyagers say they regularly navigate using te lapa,
particularly on dark, overcast nights. “It came like flicks of lightning straight
to the bow of the te puke,” Salopuka says of the first time he saw te lapa. “At
first I don’t know if it’s only me seeing that, or my friends on the canoe,
too. But everybody saw it. It’s something kind of special—is it from ancestors,
or is it just something from nature? I cannot understand or really explain.”

Evidence suggests that early Pacific settlers
migrating out of Southeast Asia first inhabited these islands around three
thousand years ago. Over time some stayed, and some migrated farther east into
the open Pacific: to Fiji, Samoa and beyond. But there remained periodic
contact and likely intermarriage among the different groups; even today
drifting Tongan mariners show up near Taumako with some regularity. It wasn’t
until two millennia later, around 1000 ACE, that the island’s ethnic identity
appears to have diverged as distinctly Polynesian in language and custom while
nearby islands remained more Melanesian. Like a few other culturally Polynesian
islands in Fiji, Vanuatu, Micronesia and other Pacific nations that lie outside
the imaginary boundaries of the so-called Polynesian Triangle, Taumako is often
referred to as a “Polynesian outlier”—a term the islanders and their supporters
aren’t crazy about.

“This is a crossroads, this place, and it always
has been,” George says of Taumako. “As people began migrating out into more
remote parts of the Pacific, this is where it started to take more than one
night to get from one island to the next. Taumako is the big jump-off. It’s a
very significant area in the prehistory of voyaging.”

While there were wayfinders on other islands
in the area, mountainous, forested Taumako was where big vaka were made. Master
craftsmen would build te puke to order—a task requiring island-wide labor and
months to complete—and then sail the craft to the owner’s island. Upon delivery
the canoe builders would receive payment in painstakingly strung coils of “red
feather money,” a traditional form of currency still used on rare occasions for
dowries and other customary purposes.

In the early 1900s as many as two hundred te
puke were reported to still be plying the waters around Taumako. But then in
1918 a terrible epidemic—likely Spanish flu—decimated the population,
reportedly leaving only thirty-seven survivors, including a young Koloso
Kaveia. A tremendous amount of traditional oral knowledge was lost, including
the island’s chiefly lineages and much wayfinding lore.

British colonization of the Solomons took a
further cultural toll, as did World War II. After the war, border disputes and
political strife restricted the sea routes, and by 1963 the last of the old
working te puke had disintegrated.

After the epidemic, young Kaveia was sent
away to another island, where he began crewing and later captained working
voyaging canoes. Eventually he became a seaman on an island-hopping supply scow
before returning to Taumako to serve the last forty or so of his approximately
ninety-eight years as the island’s elected paramount chief and primary
repository of traditional voyaging knowledge.

Kaveia’s effort to revitalize Taumako
voyaging began in 1980, when he led the construction of a te puke and captained
it using traditional navigation—the only kind he knew—more than eight hundred
miles west to Honiara and beyond. But that canoe was eventually destroyed by a
cyclone, and Kaveia, in his eighties and growing increasingly frail when Lewis
and George came to the island, was anxious to build another while he still
could.

The process of building a te puke begins more
than a year before the planned launch, with the planting of extra gardens of
yams, taro and bananas, and fattening pigs to provide for daily feasting during
construction—a traditional obligation to all the workers, because it’s said
that if they don’t eat well, neither will their adze blades. Then they begin a
sixth-month process of braiding more than a half-mile of coconut-sennit rope.

After a large tree is selected and felled
according to customary Lata lore, the builders rough out the hull in the
forest. Then the log is hauled to the sea over steep, rough terrain. Hundreds
of helpers strain on long hauling ropes, laughing together and singing chants
of Lata in rich harmonies. According to Kaveia, the hauling was once aided by a
long, slow rain, which the canoe builders of old summoned to help ease the hull
to the sea, but today that particular part of weather magic has been lost.
“Nowadays when we call rain, it rains too hard,” he told George. “The floods
are no longer gentle enough to safely bring the rough cut down.”

Once the rough hull is at the shore, it is
shaped further while groups of women start weaving lauhala (pandanus leaf) sail
panels and sewing them into the shape of Lata with his arms upraised. The
finished hull is painted with a soupy white sealant made from pulverized
seaweed, and all the large wood crossbeams and other structural members are
carved and fitted.

Finally, Kaveia explained: “We must deliver
the te puke to the island of the person who ordered it. … Once we know the te
puke is seaworthy, we carefully prepare and load the cargo, do our weather
control work and depart Taumako. When we arrive at our destination, we blow our
conch shell so we know that they are ready to receive us, and we go ashore to
the valuables and feast they have prepared for us. When they are ready they
will sail us back to our island and depart as proud owners of their new te
puke.”

In the late 1990s, thanks to funding and
efforts from the newly formed Vaka Taumako Project, Kaveia was able to
supervise the construction of a te puke and sail it to Nifiloli, where the
first voyaging vaka to land there in many years was greeted with jubilation and
feasting.

With that accomplished, Kaveia began planning
a more difficult voyage to a partner island named Vanualava, which lies about
three hundred miles south of Taumako, in Vanuatu. A number of Taumako kids had
gone to school there before World War II and had never been able to return
home. Their relatives were eager to reconnect with them.

On the Vaka Taumako Project’s web site, vaka.org,
George writes of the last time she saw Kaveia alive in 2008, after his hopes
for the Vanuatu voyage were dashed by funding shortfalls and bureaucratic red
tape: “I saw him sitting on a log by the seaside. Hour after hour he looked
toward Vanuatu under a sky full of bright stars. Just before dawn I heard him
cough at my threshold, and I beckoned him in. He said ‘I just made the voyage
to Vanuatu and returned! I saw every sign—wind, swell, star and te lapa. … We
are ready.’”

A few months later Kaveia passed on to the
realm of the ancestors. Those still on Taumako have been trying ever since to
fulfill his dream of a voyage to Vanuatu, a feat that can be accomplished only
in November or early December, when a rare wind known as te palapu blows from the north. They planned to make an attempt in
2015, but then record-setting Cyclone Pam swept through the area and destroyed
the island’s only existing vaka, along with all the gardens and fruit trees. It
took two months before a relief boat even reached Taumako, and for most of the
next year, residents focused on finding food, replanting and rebuilding before
once again going through the whole process of constructing not just one, but
two te puke for another attempt in late 2016.

Several hundred people moved back to the
island just to participate in the effort, now led by Chief Jonas Hollani, who
had voyaged with Kaveia, and his son Ambrose Miki, along with Kaveia’s own son
Chief Fox Boda. “People in Taumako are really interested in this, and young
people really drive the project,” George says. “But even married older people
will just drop everything and come and work their butts off. They really want
to do it.”

Food and money were raised to feed the
workers and help pay their children’s school fees. George and fellow Kaua‘i
supporter Meph Wyeth came down to help with the herculean administrative
labors, as crew members had to produce often nonexistent birth documents and
obtain approval signatures from faraway government centers to get passports.
Two female immigration officers agreed to travel more than a hundred miles by
dangerous open fiberglass canoe to Taumako to clear the crew for departure at
any time within a one-month window. And in the middle of all this, the only
available communication link, a satellite phone, went down.

When November came the crew was ready for a
journey that was expected to take two to four days. But no te palapu wind blew.
For several weeks everyone waited on pins and needles. One of the voyagers even
visited the grave site of an ancestor on a nearby island to ask for help in
summoning the wind. Then, on November 18, there was the lightest hint of te
palapu, so they took the larger te puke out for a shakedown sail a few miles
offshore. If the wind improved, perhaps they would continue on.

Out on the water, the crew of eight was
itching to go: “There were a lot of questions: ‘Why can’t we just go now;
what’s the reason?” George recalls. But it wasn’t to be. There were too many
issues to be ironed out on the new canoe, and the wind remained light. It
turned out to be a good thing, because the next morning the breeze began
blowing strongly from the south.

Maddeningly, a suitable te palapu wind did
arrive on the very last day of the one-month departure window and blew for a
couple of days. But by then there was no way to complete the voyage before the
crew’s immigration clearance expired, so the journey had to be postponed.

Preparations are under way for another
Vanuatu attempt late this year, and in June the voyagers intend to make a
shorter sail to the provincial capital of Lata for the Solomons’ independence
day celebration. What seems certain is that the elders and the students of
Taumako’s recently formed Lata Voyaging School are determined to fulfill
Kaveia’s voyaging vision as something essential to the life of the island:
reuniting Lata with his people. As Kaveia himself wrote in a 1999 article with
George: “In Lata’s absence, we the people of Taumako are miserable and fight
among ourselves. When he returns, we come together as a people and we feel
joy.”

To learn more about Taumako voyaging or to
help support it, visit vaka.org.